Description: The Japanese new wave (Nuberu Bagu) is a group of loosely connected Japanese filmmakers during the late 1950’s & into the 1970’s. Although they did not make up a coherent movement, these artists shared a rejection of traditions & conventions of classical Japanese cinema in favor of more challenging works, both thematically & formally. Coming to the fore in a time of national social change & unrest, the films made in this wave dealt with taboo subject matter.
Creator: Rodjenka
Posted: 4 years ago
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Movie:
Tattooed Life
( 1965 )
After his own gang sets him up to kill a rival mobster, a hit man is forced to flee with his younger brother.
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Movie:
The Insect Woman
( 1964 )
Amorality in Japan. Tome is born into poverty in rural Japan, in the late 1910s. Chuji, her father, dotes on her; her mother is less faithful. Tome becomes a neighbor's mistress, works at his mill as World War II rages, and has a daughter. After an affair with a mill supervisor, Tome goes to Tokyo to seek her fortune. She leaves the child, Nobuko, in Chuji's care. Tome's a maid at a brothel, learns trade from the madam, enjoys the protection of a businessman whose mistress she becomes, and is soon herself the boss. As Chuji ages and Nobuko grows up with her own ideas, can Tome's self-preserving schemes provide continued comfort? Or will the mice scamper over her?
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Movie:
Punishment Room
( 1956 )
Katsumi is a university student who has no respect for his hardworking parents, his professors, or even his friends. He helps one friend obtain a loan to finance a dance, by humiliating his father at the bank where he works. He drugs and rapes Akiko, one of the girls in his class. She becomes infatuated with him, even though he remains aloof. He enjoys goading a rival gang in the pool hall. Finally, when facing the gang, he goes too far in trying to prove his courage.
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Movie:
Crazed Fruit
( 1956 )
Bored rich kids. Natsuhisa, 20, constantly teases his brother Haruji, 16, about girls. They arrive by train for a summer at the beach; at the station, Haruji spots a young woman and can think of nothing else for the next few days. When they cross paths again - she's Eri - Haru invites her to a party at the house of a friend whose parents are divorced. They start a slow courtship. Then, Natsuhisa discovers Eri's secret; instead of it ending everything, Natsuhisa initiates a triangle by seeking the favors of his younger brother's girl. Haru is unaware of this betrayal. What will happen when he finds out?
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Movie:
Suzaki Paradise Red Light
( 1956 )
A couple stand indecisively on a bridge in Asakusa. Tsutae and Yoshiji have lost confidence and passion for their future as they get on the bus for Tsukishima and get off at Suzaki. Across the bridge they see the sign for Suzaki Paradise, a red-light district where Tsutae once worked as a prostitute. Tsutae spots an ad for a waitress at a bar near the bridge and she rushes in to get the job. The kind hearted madam, Tokuko, helps them out by hiring Tsutae and finding work for Yoshiji delivering noodles. But the wanton Tsutae is soon attracted to Ochiai, a rich, generous man who owns an electrical shop specializing in radios.
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Movie:
The Kiss
( 1957 )
Kinichi and Akiko meet when they visit their fathers in prison. After successfully gambling on a bicycle race, they spend an enjoyable day together at the beach. Akiko, who tries to make money as an artist's model to pay for her mother's medical expenses, now has to find 100,000 yen to pay off the company from which her father embezzled. Kinichi also requires 100,000 yen as bail for his father, who is accused of election fraud. Kinichi tries to borrow 100,000 yen from his mother, whom he has not seen for three years.
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Movie:
Giants and Toys
( 1958 )
In the middle of a fierce commercial competition between three caramel companies, an executive builds up a ditsy teenage girl as a mascot while simultaneously trying to uncover the rival companies' plans.
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Movie:
A Town of Love and Hope
( 1959 )
A young man runs a scam selling pigeons that always return to his home. A rich girl takes an interest in him and tries to help him find a good job.
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Movie:
The Sun's Burial
( 1985 )
In Osaka's slum, youth without futures engage in pilfering, assault and robbery, prostitution, and the buying and selling of identity cards and of blood. Alliances constantly shift. Tatsu and Takeshi, friends since boyhood, reluctantly join Shin's gang. Shin's an upstart and moves his gang often to avoid the local kingpin. Hanoko is a young woman with ambitions: first she's in the blood business with her father, then she joins forces with Shin. She soon breaks off that partnership, even though she's taken the sensitive Takeshi under her wing. Double crosses multiply. Those with the closest bonds become each others' murderers.
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Movie:
Nihon no yoru to kiri
( 1985 )
Long takes and a highly theatrical visual approach combine to form a tense and confrontational look at the decline of a socialist student activists' movement in Japan.
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Movie:
The Naked Island
( 1960 )
A family of four are the sole inhabitants of a small island, where they struggle each day to irrigate their crops.
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Movie:
The Warped Ones
( 1960 )
A juvenile delinquent gets out of the pen and immediately embarks on a rampage of untethered anger, most of it directed at the girlfriend of the journalist who helped send him up. The Warped Ones sounded a lost generation's cry for help and was one of the films that kicked off Japan's cinematic sixties with a bang.
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Movie:
Furyo shonen
( 1961 )
An improvisational film depicting life in a boys' reform school.
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Movie:
Pigs and Battleships
( 1963 )
A young hoodlum decides to work for a criminal organization that is tearing itself apart.
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Movie:
The Catch
( 1961 )
The film is a relentlessly savage fable about a Japanese mountain village whose inhabitants accidentally capture a black American airman only a few weeks before the 1945 capitulation. The 'prisoner of war' acts as a catalyst, bringing out all the repressed aggression and latent political conflicts beneath the tradition-girded surface of the community.
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Movie:
Pitfall
( 1962 )
A documentary fantasy. Penniless miners talk in passing about labor unions. A miner and his young son go to a village in Kyushu where the miner has been told he'll find work, but it's a ghost town, save for one woman. The miner leaves and is followed by a man in a white suit and white gloves. A murder takes place: faked footprints, bribery and intrigue, investigations, a frame-up, and a ghost who wants to know why meet in a story of realism and the surreal. A child mutely witnesses all. Does the truth count for anything in this world or in the next? Can everything be manipulated?
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Movie:
She and He
( 1963 )
In a sterile building complex, a woman gains a sense of altruism after encountering a street beggar and his blind orphan, much to her husband's disapproval.
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Movie:
Intentions of Murder
( 1964 )
A housewife living under her tyrannical husband has her life stressfully turned upside down after getting raped by a burglar.
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Movie:
Assassination
( 1964 )
In 1863, when Americans warships approach Japan, a enigmatic ronin becomes a important figure in a complex game of power between the Shogunate and the empire.
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Movie:
Pale Flower
( 1964 )
Just released from prison after serving three years for murdering a member of a rival gang, Maraki, a middle-aged yakuza, returns to his old haunts in Tokyo largely out of loyalties despite not much liking that life or himself in the process. Those old routines include assuming his place within the Funada gang, reconnecting with Shinko, his twenty-three year old girlfriend, who wants a commitment from him (something he probably isn't willing to give), she threatening to accept another marriage proposal otherwise despite her love for him, and gambling at his usual illegal card den despite he not often winning. Although at first glance he thinks nothing has changed in three years, there are some major changes, especially that the Funada gang has merged with that rival gang partly to maintain the peace. One other change is that an innocent looking, young, upscale woman, Saeko, she the only female, has started gambling at that same card den, that innocent look beyond the fact that she likes to play big. He becomes her mentor and protector of sorts in he introducing her to an illegal card den with higher stakes, which is what she is seeking. In spending more and more time with her and in a chance encounter, Maraki not only begins to understand Saeko in she not being the total innocent her may have first assumed, especially in her curiosity with Yoh, the seeming drug addict cowering in the corner of the card den, but evaluates his ritualized life in the process.
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Movie:
Gate of Flesh
( 1964 )
An injured thief on the run finds sanctuary within a brothel of united, ruthless women.
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Movie:
Woman in the Dunes
( 1964 )
Jumpei Niki, a Tokyo based entomologist and educator, is in a poor seaside village collecting specimens of sand insects. As it is late in the day and as he has missed the last bus back to the city, some of the local villagers suggest that he spend the night there, they offering to find him a place to stay. That place is the home of a young woman, whose house is located at the bottom of a sand pit accessible only by ladder. He later learns that the woman's husband and child died in a sandstorm, their undiscovered bodies buried somewhere near the house. The next morning as he tries to leave, he finds that the ladder is gone - he realizing that the ladder he climbed down was a rope ladder which is anchored above the pit - meaning that he is trapped with the young woman as the walls of the pit are sand with no grip. He also realizes that this entrapment was the villagers and the young woman's plan for him to stay there permanently to be her helper in the never-ending task of digging out the sand, which if not done will swallow them alive. They are dependent upon the villagers to help remove the sand, but also for their rations including water. He learns that the sand is the young woman's life, and that she knows or wants no other life. Thus, it is no use either to blackmail or kill her as she is willing to live and die by this life, and as such he will surely die if she is dead. His life tasks become to figure out a way to escape while co-exist with the woman in what he considers their prison. As time goes on, he also learns that there are other tasks which will consume him.
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Movie:
Utsukushisa to kanashimi to
( 1965 )
Long before the events of the movie Ôki, who was approaching middle age, had a relation to 16-year-old Otoko. She got pregnant, but the child was stillborn. Their relation stopped at the same time. Much later Ôki had become a famous writer, not least because of a novel about this love story. Otoko had become a famous painter. But she had never overcome the double early trauma and had become a Lesbian. Her favourite student and beloved one was the beautiful Keiko. 24 years after the early love Ôki goes from Tokyo to Kyoto to meet Otoko. The meeting is polite with secret emotional shadows. Keiko makes a plan. She intends to seduce Ôki, become pregnant, bear Ôki's child and give it to Otoko. She hopes that Otoko may thereby get rid of her trauma. But she also wants to take her revenge on the man who had harmed her beloved. Secretly she gets acquainted with Ôki's son, invites him to Kyoto and seduces him. Then she calls his parents and tells that he had promised to marry her. Horrified they take the first plane to Kyoto. Meanwhile, she takes the son on boating, arranges an accident, and drowns him. It is close that she herself would also die.
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Movie:
A Story Written with Water
( 1965 )
Shizuo discovers a mysterious letter about his fiancé Yumiko, which prompts him to explore his sexual psychology and memories. His childhood and adult life unfold simultaneously, and he feels increasingly obligated to choose between mother and fiancé. Whichever choice he makes, it seems one will rule out the other.
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Movie:
The Pornographers
( 1966 )
While avoiding the mob and local authorities, a world-weary pornographer finds being a family man the most difficult as he wrestles with his own desires and afflictions.
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Movie:
Violence at Noon
( 1966 )
Hakuchu no Torima" is the portrayal of a violent rapist as seen through the recollections of his wife and one of his victims. As the film starts, Eisuke (Kei Sato) encounters Shino (Saeda Kawaguchi), who works as a maid in a house. She is a former coworker from a failed collective farm, whose life he once saved -- only to rape her. Soon, Eisuke's criminal pattern of rapes and murders emerges as he goes on assaulting women (Shino being the witness of one of them, as Eisuke tries to violate her employer). When cooperating with the police on making a description of the rapist, Shino withholds her crucial knowledge of his identity. She prefers writing letters to Eisuke's dutiful wife, Matsuko, a schoolteacher (Akiko Koyama -- Mrs Oshima), in order to expose his true nature and perhaps induce her into turning Eisuke over to the police.
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Movie:
Fighting Elegy
( 1966 )
In Okayama in the mid-1930s, Kiroku attends high school and boards with a Catholic family whose daughter, Michiko, captures his heart. He must, however, hide his ardor and other aspects of his emerging sexuality, focusing his energy on a gang he joins, breaking school rules, and getting into scuffles (he tells her, "Oh, Michiko, I don't masturbate, I fight"). He comes under the influence of a young tough nicknamed Terrapin, and together they lead fights against rival gangs. Gradually, Kiroku and Terrapin align themselves with the right-wing Kita Ikki, and Kiroku becomes a stand-in for the attitudes of Japanese youth who embraced the imperialism leading to World War II.
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Movie:
Tokyo Drifter
( 1966 )
In Tokyo, the gangster Tetsu (Tetsuya Watari) regenerates when his yakuza boss Kurata (Ryuji Kita) decides to quit his criminal life. However, the mobster family leaded by Otsuka (Hideaki Esumi) threatens Kurata's legitimate business, and Tetsu decides to leave Kurata to relief the pressure on him. He leaves also his girlfriend Chiharu (Chieko Matsubara) and becomes a drifter moving to the country. When Tetsu is betrayed, he returns to Tokyo to resolve his situation.
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Movie:
The Face of Another
( 1966 )
A businessman with a disfigured face obtains a lifelike mask from his doctor, but the mask starts altering his personality.
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Movie:
A Man Vanishes
( 1967 )
Plastics salesman Oshima disappeared without a word to anyone, and has been missing for two years. Shohei Imamura and his crew follow Oshima's fiancé Yoshie and actor Shigeru Tsuyuguchi as they investigate the disappearance.
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Movie:
Branded to Kill
( 1967 )
The number-three-ranked hit-man, with a fetish for sniffing boiling rice, fumbles his latest job, which puts him into conflict with a mysterious woman whose death wish inspires her to surround herself with dead butterflies and dead birds. Worse danger comes from his own treacherous wife and finally with the number-one-ranked hit-man, known only as a phantom to those who fear his unseen presence.
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Movie:
Profound Desires of the Gods
( 1970 )
The Tokyo engineer Kariya arrives on a primitive tropical island to drill a well to provide water for the sugar mill. He is assisted on the island by Kametaro, from the inbred Futori family. Nekichi Futori is chained in a pit that he has to dig, in order to appease the gods for breaking island customs. Nekichi is in love with his sister Uma, who is a shaman priestess at the sacred shrine, that contains the only good water close to the mill. She is also the mistress of Ryu, the manager of the mill. The patriarch of the Futori family tries to get the engineer to marry his retarded daughter Toriko.
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Movie:
Death by Hanging
( 1968 )
A Korean man is sentenced to death by hanging, but he survives the execution. For the following two hours, his executioners try to work out how to handle the situation in this black farce.
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Movie:
Three Resurrected Drunkards
( 1968 )
A carefree afternoon at the beach turns into a comic misadventure when three young Japanese men are mistaken for illegal Korean residents.
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Movie:
The Man Without a Map
( 1968 )
A private detective is hired to find a missing man by his wife. Contradictory evidence and the lack of clues soon render the case as virtually unsolvable, as the detective grows more and more frustrated.
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Movie:
Eros + Massacre
( 1970 )
In the 1920s, the anarchist revolutionary Sakae Osugi is financially supported by his wife, journalist Itsuko Masaoka. He spends his time doing nothing but philosophizing about political systems and free love and visiting with his lovers Yasuko and the earlier feminist Noe Ito. He conveniently defends three principles for a relationship between a man and a woman: they should be financially independent (despite the fact that he is not); they should live in different places; and they should be free to have sex with other people. In 1969, twenty-year-old student, Eiko Sokuta is sexually active with various men. Her friend, Wada, is obsessed with fire and they usually play odd games using a camera while they read about Osugi and Ito.
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Movie:
Funeral Parade of Roses
( 1970 )
While dealing drugs on the side, Gonda operates the Genet, a gay bar in Tokyo where he has hired a stable of transvestites to service the customers. The madame or lead "girl" of the bar is Leda, an older, old fashioned geisha-styled transvestite with who Gonda lives and is in a relationship. Arguably, the most popular of the girls working at the bar now is Eddie, a younger, modern transvestite. Like Leda, Eddie lives openly as a woman. Eddie's troubled life includes her father having deserted the family when she was a child, and having had a difficult relationship with her mother following, she who mocked Eddie's ability to be the man the of the family. Gonda enters into a sexual relationship with Eddie, who he promises to make madame of the bar, replacing Leda in both facets of his life, with Eddie having threatened to quit otherwise. While Leda suspects what Gonda and Eddie are up to, Gonda tells Leda what she wants to hear, much as he tells Eddie what she wants to hear. As this triangle plays itself out, what actually happens is affected by a joint history between Gonda and Eddie of which they are unaware. This film teeters between fiction and non-fiction as a secondary story is Eddie's friendship with a group of counter-culturalists, including filmmaker Guevara, whose making of a movie mirrors the making of this film. That balance tips into non-fiction as the actual actors in this and Guevara's movie talk about issues covered in this film, such as drug use, and sexuality, especially transvestism as the transvestite characters are played by real life transvestites.
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Movie:
Boy
( 1970 )
A young boy reluctantly aids his swindling father in a threatening scam.
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Movie:
Diary of a Shinjuku Thief
( 1973 )
Story of a bookstore thief named Birdey who is led through various adventures in Tokyo's Shinjuku district by salesgirl Umeko.
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Movie:
Double Suicide
( 1970 )
In 18th Century in Japan, the paper merchant Jihei (Kichiemon Nakamura) falls in love for the courtesan Koharu (Shima Iwashita), but he can not afford to redeem her from her master and owner of the brothel, since he spent all his money in the place with Koharu. Jihei's wife Osan tries to keep her husband with his two children and asks Koharu to leave him. The two lovers make a pact of double suicide to escape from the rigid rules of the Japanese society of 1720 and stay together after death.
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Movie:
Go, Go, Second Time Virgin
( 1969 )
After being raped in an unknown rooftop, nineteen year-old girl Poppo meets a mysterious boy, and both share their sexual traumas and fears, with fatal consequences.
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Movie:
The Man Who Put His Will on Film
( 1970 )
A metaphysical mystery involving a university student's camera getting stolen, and the thief then committing suicide. Looking back upon the event, the situation comes to be questioned if it happened at all.
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Movie:
The Ceremony
( 1974 )
Upon receiving a shocking telegram from his cousin, a man recounts his early life, as a member of a broad family full of dark secrets that slowly reveal themselves through the clan ceremonies.
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Movie:
Summer Soldiers
( 1972 )
A Vietnam veteran deserts from the US Army while on leave in Japan.
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Movie:
Dear Summer Sister
( 1985 )
Story is about a Tokyo girl looking round Okinawa island for her long-lost brother and finding he is the tourist guide with whom she has had an affair.
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Movie:
Coup d'Etat
( 1973 )
A freestyle biopic of Ikki Kita, the ultranationalist intellectual whose ideas inspired the failed military coup in 1936.
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Movie:
Pastoral Hide and Seek
( 1974 )
A young boys' coming of age tale set in a strange, carnivalesque village becomes the recreation of a memory that the director has twenty years later.
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Movie:
In the Realm of the Senses
( 1976 )
A passionate telling of the story of Sada Abe, a woman whose affair with her master led to an obsessive and ultimately destructive sexual relationship.
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greyfur : Seriously?